What are you missing from the existing answers, which made you open up a bounty?
–
ChristianOct 27 '10 at 12:45

Make sure to partition wisely, aside from installing Windows the boot corruptor first, this will save you the biggest heartaches. Also, leave space unformatted or in a larger than necessary swap file. Keep that swap partition next to Windows so when it bloats you can absorb a bit. gParted works wonders, but corruption is always possible with NTFS.
–
mfgNov 2 '10 at 12:49

4 Answers
4

In my experience always install Windows as first OS. Otherwise it will overwrite the boot loader of the previously installed OS. There are ways around it, but these just make it more complicated.

After installing Windows, install your first Linux distribution. It normally will find your Windows installation and add it to its boot loader automatically so you can dual boot with windows and Linux.

Now comes the third Linux distribution. Some distributions find other distributions and will add them to their boot loader (I don't know for sure about SUSE and Red Hat). Just try it during your installation. When all OSes are recognized install the boot loader of your third OS, otherwise boot into your first Linux distribution and add the second one manually to the boot loader. As the type and version of the boot loader depend on the distribution I can't tell you how to do it, but you'll find some good tutorials in the net.

First of all, prepare your hard disk. I use the parted live cd for that. So you don't have to worry about partitioning while you're installing the distributions.

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Use the following layout: One
primary Windows NTFS partition; One
primary Linux partition, which has a
size of ~200 MB for /boot (ext2 oder
3). Two primary Linux partitions
(ext4), One logical partition for
swap. This should be twice the size
of your ram.

Install Windows

Install the first Linux Distribution, with grub as bootloader

Install the second Linux Distribution, don't install a bootloader

Boot into the first Linux Distribution, edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add the second linux distribution

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That's it. Windows should be added to grubs menu.lst automatically.
If you want to install 2 distributions, that name their kernels the same way, you'll have to reboot into the first linux distro before installing the second one, and rename your kernel to something else, and change the menu.lst file to match it.